If you’ve read this post, you’ll know that I’ve spent the
past four months tricking myself into writing every day. I still use the word “tricking”
because, although writing everyday has begun to feel a lot more natural and enjoyable,
getting that checkmark has often been tiresome and painful. Not breaking the
chain has meant writing at eleven o’clock in that borderline laughter-crying
state college students have mastered. In the car on the way home from spending
the day at my best friend’s school and I have about fifteen minutes to type
something out on my phone that will probably make no sense because I’ve slept
about three hours. But I’ve kept the chain going so far, and with each mark I
have new motivation not to skip a day. This may be the first time during any
academic year that I’ve managed to stay creatively grounded despite all my
school stress. And all that is because I’ve learned to write even when I just
don’t want to.
Before this
year, I fell into the mindset that many young writers have, that I shouldn’t
write if I’m not feeling inspired. Writing without all consuming desire would
just feel like dry heaving. All my efforts would produce would be dry prose
that offends all literary decency by virtue of existence. So it’s better to not
write and just keep watching the same episodes of Parks & Rec over and over again, right?
But I never really found the perfect
moment to start. There was always some distraction, some anxiety, some looming
responsibility that inhibited the creative mojo I wanted to just flow onto the
page. As a result, I never wrote regularly, getting work done only in the
summer when I was bored enough to finally open a Word Document.
I didn’t know that this isn’t how
writing careers work. Fancy authors with their book deals and stuff are swathed
with deadlines and contracts. Waiting for inspiration isn’t an option when your
agent keeps calling. Authors still seem to deliver just as well, if not better,
on their second and third books.
What I defined as Waiting for
Inspiration was just repackaged pretentiousness and apprehension. Forcing
myself to write every day required me to accept that all first drafts are crap,
but crappy writing is better than no writing because at least I’ll have
something to revise later. Inspiration isn’t something that falls at a person’s
feet; one has to find it on their own.
A strange thing happens in the
absence of inspiration. A writer has to take risks they would otherwise not
take. I chose to write a coming of age story, a novel that takes place all in
one night, because despite all the anxieties I have about those tropes, they
are the best ideas I have right now. I’ll probably screw it up, but that’s
okay. I can fix it tomorrow anyway.
So this is my advice, which will
sound hypocritical since this is a whole blog post about thinking about writing
as opposed to actually writing, but:
If you want to be a writer, then
write already. Quit waiting. Quit thinking. Just write. Now.
